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Jonah Goldberg: President Obama freed Bowe Bergdahl, but at what cost to the U.S.?

There he goes again. At a news conference in Brussels Thursday, President Barack Obama was asked whether he was surprised by the controversy over his decision to trade Bowe Bergdahl for five high-ranking Taliban leaders.

His response was vintage Obama: “I’m never surprised by controversies that are whipped up in Washington.”

Obama established from the start that he considers the controversy to be a partisan farce. He then rebutted criticisms. This is Obama’s favorite rhetorical trick; he builds and then tears apart a straw man, insisting the American people are on his side.

“I make absolutely no apologies for making sure that we get back a young man to his parents and that the American people understand that this is somebody’s child and that we don’t condition whether or not we make the effort to try to get them back,” he said.

Scour the Internet, and you won’t find a single person who has denied that Bowe Bergdahl is someone’s child.

Search through statements of Obama’s critics and you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone who disagrees that the U.S. should do what it can to retrieve its POWs. No one has ever said the U.S. shouldn’t try.

But, obviously, we must put conditions on the effort. That Bergdahl was held captive for half a decade is proof of that.

The administration had been negotiating for years for Bergdahl’s release. Why negotiate at all if we don’t have conditions?

Of course, the real intent behind Obama’s spin is to take the focus off credible allegations that Bergdahl was a deserter sympathetic to America’s enemies and put it on the more sympathetic parents who just wanted their child back.

But the insinuation that only his critics are guilty of politicizing this foreign policy decision is reprehensible and ridiculous. A 2012 Rolling Stone story on Bergdahl included a quote from a “senior administration official familiar with the negotiations” who said that, “It could be a huge win if Obama could bring him home.” The official added, “Especially in an election year, if it’s handled properly.”

Many analysts are convinced that Obama’s real motive was to help him make good on his promise to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, and thus pad his legacy. Administration officials have been hinting as much anonymously for a week.

A senior Pentagon official tells the Daily Mail that the president rejected proposals to rescue Bergdahl because “the president wanted a diplomatic scenario that would establish a precedent for repatriating detainees from Gitmo.” This is in keeping with his withdrawal-at-all-cost Afghanistan policy, in which the only timetable that matters is the one driven by his personal political priorities. Obama wants out of Afghanistan before he leaves office and he needed Bergdahl home to do that.

This is almost surely why the White House went ahead with a Rose Garden event with Bergdahl’s parents. Deep in the White House bunker, they still thought this would be a “huge win” politically. They expected a moment of national celebration to welcome home a hero and that Americans wouldn’t much care that we traded away five enemy combatants.

And they were so enthralled by their political strategy that they didn’t think to get their facts straight about Bergdahl’s record. Hence the hapless performance by National Security Adviser Susan Rice, who went on ABC’s “This Week” to say that Bergdahl had served with “honor and distinction” and that he was captured on the battlefield. One can reserve judgment about whether Bergdahl was a deserter, but it’s already clear that Rice’s comments were baldly false.

And the claim that Bergdahl’s health was so bad that it justified Obama’s decision to flout the law requiring they notify Congress of any Gitmo prisoner transfers seems to be unraveling as well.

But none of that matters. Because this is just a whipped-up controversy.

To reach Jonah Goldberg, editor at large of National Review Online, send email to jonahscolumn@aol.com.

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